Big Interview - author Joanne Harris on her latest novel Sleepers in the Snow

Born in Barnsley, Harris has remained in Yorkshire – she now lives in a village near Huddersfield – and the landscape of the county and its history and folklore have often inspired her work over the years. Her latest novel, Sleepers in the Snow published earlier this month, is a case in point. Set on the North York moors, it tells the story of an unnamed middle-aged man who, following a bitter divorce, moves into a remote house called Kirkhill high on the hills, looking for a fresh start. He has chosen the house partly because it is away from it all and he is seeking solitude, but it is a home with a dark history that gradually begins to impinge on the man’s psyche.

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“In a way, the story seemed to me to come out of nowhere but I think I was actually processing the death of my father,” says Harris. “I started writing this cold wintry book that explores memory and dementia and secrets and I realised I was writing a kind of ghost story.” We are in the Halloween season, with the nights drawing in, so it is perfect timing for a ghost story, although this is much more complex and layered than simply a spooky tale. Harris skilfully unnerves the reader, creating a growing sense of unease and discombobulation as the narrative progresses. The house is located directly under a gigantic pylon which hums constantly, and it contains the furniture and belongings, including diaries, of the previous occupants, a couple named Caroline and Arthur Sanderson. Without giving away any spoilers, both those facts contribute to the protagonist’s increasing isolation.

Harris began writing Sleepers in the Snow not long after the death of her father who had lived for many years with ill-health and dementia and the story explores aspects of grief, loss, memory, mystery and ghosts of various kinds. “I wrote the book quite fast – it took me around three months which is the period that the story spans,” she says. “It starts in the autumn, as I did when I began writing in autumn 2024, and it ends in the middle of winter. There is nothing gory in it – it is unsettling in the way that we are afraid of certain things and we try to process them through stories. And it explores some of the things that we fear, such as being alone, and death.”

The setting of the North York moors is key – the landscape is almost like another character and it plays a significant role in the narrative. “That particular landscape is so steeped in history and folklore and I liked the way it fitted into the progress of this story,” says Harris. The Lyke-Wake Dirge, a traditional English folk song that tells of the soul’s journey to purgatory, is a recurring theme in the book and there are references to the ancient coffin routes, footpaths used in medieval times to transport the dead to burial sites, that cross the moors. “I wanted to explore the protagonist’s relationship to his surroundings and how they become more oppressive as time goes on and as the seasons change. When the snow comes in the winter, he is more and more closed off. It is fraught with all kinds of uncertainty and he is trapped in the house with these two people who are gone but who are also present through their belongings and diaries.”

Music is an important part of Harris’ life – she still performs with the band that she first joined as a teenager; they recently recorded a CD – and she often creates playlists for her novels. She says that although she doesn’t have music playing while she is actually writing, she finds it useful to listen to certain tracks that help to sustain the atmosphere of a book. The playlist for Sleepers in the Snow includes Glen Campbell’s the Wichita Lineman, Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights and Laurie Anderson’s O Superman – and, of course, the Lyke-Wake Dirge. “I wanted to reference that folk song in the book because it is the story of the soul’s progress through various trials and the protagonist is in a kind of limbo state where he is refusing to process his past,” says Harris. “There is this idea of a secret and guilt, and memory and the tricks it plays, the way we manipulate our memories. In a way the ghost here is the ghost of himself.”

The theme of the weight of the past and its impact on the present can be found in much of Harris’s work. “To me it is a core aspect of what I do,” she says. “What people are afraid of, what their past baggage is, what their fears are, the guilt they carry and how all that feels. Complex human beings are at the heart of it all.”

One of the writers that Harris has been inspired by is American author Shirley Jackson, whose career spanned the 1940s to the 1960s, known for her horror and mystery novels. “I am a big fan,” says Harris. “She writes about simple, everyday things in a way that is slightly surreal. There is a disconnect – she can make the most ordinary things sound sinister. That’s the effect I was going for – I wanted to make going into the kitchen feel like a reach.” Harris absolutely achieves that sense of the hidden menace in the quotidian, constantly putting the reader on the back foot, questioning what is real and what is imagined. It is deliciously unnerving.

There is something visceral about ghost stories, mysteries and the supernatural which have long held a fascination for human beings, stretching back to the earliest forms of storytelling. “I think we love them because we like to contain those scary things in a narrative that will eventually make sense,” says Harris. “We take something that is frightening and unpredictable and fit it into a safe space. We need to be able to explore that in fiction – that is why fairytales are so dark. In a pre-Freudian time, it was a way to explore dark themes. It is cathartic for us.”

Sleepers in the Snow is out now. Joanne Harris is appearing at Whitby Litfest on November 20. The festival runs November 19-22. Details whitbylitfest.org.uk